Shaolin Girl – Review October 28, 2009

Shaolin Girl is a bad motion picture. So you either have two choices when viewing this film, you can consider it a guilty pleasure, or you can classify it was a movie not wasting your time on. Rin is our main character who is a student of the Shaolin Temple who returns home to her little Japanese town after finally leaving the school. She finds that her former students and teacher have turned their back on the martial arts. Joining a former friend on a high school lacrosse team, they winds up training the other players in martial arts. The university president has an ulterior motive, that I won’t care to spoil, that will ultimately result in a confrontation.

Our main girl in real life isn’t a martial artist, but she did spend a year training and I thought she acquitted herself admirably. It’s a comedy with some cute girls, but don’t expect much in the way of an interesting story as there was in Kung Fu Hustle. This is defientely a film that will appeal to foreign movie lovers while the rest of America will leave scratching their heads. The finale look straight out of Game of Death where our alpha-female do battle floor to floor encountering various martial arts masters, but come to think of it, they were dispatched with incredible ease.

However, despite all that talk about teaming, it still boiled down to a one-woman whackfest for the last act. The posters claim that the movie is from Stephen Chow himself, though they use that in the loosest sense possible. Chow’s involvement in the film is minimal at best, and it really shows. Everything’s a little too slow, or too low, or too telegraphed.

Rin and the President have a huge CG fight, mostly on CG water that works really bad, and it is a toss up if he wants her to become evil, or just fight her. Really confusing content here that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. Also if you’ll notice there was even a part were some fighters fell in the pool but remained dry when they got up and continued fighting. Is this a magic pool or what? Yeah, it’s one of those “it’s so bad it’s good films”. Shoalin Girl is an enjoyable movie but heed my warnings going into it.